Places and Spaces: imprints of early life.

Where did you play?

Follow the thread: my memories are an endless path leading back into my past, making me who I am.

The beach at Leysdown, looking towards Warden Point. The diamond-shaped patch of green in the upper left hand corner is the caravan park where my Grandparents had their caravan back in the late 1970s

WWII concrete batteries: these eerie little buildings were mesmerising to me. Inside the tiny room, as the tide encroached, I felt the relentless power of nature. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Ryan Coe.

Sheppey: mud and huts

A treasure trove of adventure,I ran among dystopian destructionfinding my freedom in erosion.The sea bit at earth,turning cliffs to preservative unction,and fossils formed in numbers so greateach one found was one born.

My nine-year old self saw wonderin the sliding land, where a place came to die.I felt the magicof tragedy, and savage beauty.In renewed decay, freshened by each sweep of the tide.

It all seemed so secret.The house in the woods:two chimneys, one staircasethat went nowhere, skywards.Twisted vines and shattered bottleslittered the shape of its foundations,'cos even if the shelter has gonewe still find comfort in the ideathat it was ever there at all.

Where the wild cherries bloomedand we ate until our stomachs cried.The path through the woods -trod by all the kids before us -and out into the meadow.Cutting swathes through waist-high grass,to lie on our backs and laugh at the sky.

And... oh, here come the goose-bumps!Clambering down crumbly cliffsof London clay.Eyes set on the prize:toppling war bunkers, making slow progresst'ward the beckoning sea,ground fell away beneath them.

We entered, as the tide approached,lapping up through two dark rooms.We sat, motionless, scared to breathe!The black water had us in its sights,creeping ink seeking our toes,we stretched our legs before us... waiting.

When we felt the first icy touchcooled by old, cold concrete,we ran screaming and elated!Believing nothing in our liveswould ever be half so exciting again.

Back at the blue and white caravan,mum piled a plate high with sandwiches,never guessing at my quickened heartbeator flushed cheeks.

I washed London clay from my feetand put on a pair of warm socks.

The Why

A lament for the tower block where I spent the first few years of my childhood in Larner Road, Erith. Along with four of its brethren, the block was demolished in June 2013 to make way for a new £120m regeneration project.

Larner Road, Erith: seven tower blocks overlooking my home town on the Kent/south east London border. About to be removed from the skyline forever. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Dave Stradwick.

Once they were giants, standing against the sky. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Dave Stradwick.

A home in the sky.

I left this place when I was 8. These tower blocks, once a cardiac arrest on the ECG skyline of the town, have now been demolished. In the years since I called it home, no. 70 Medina House, from its vantage point on the 13th floor, has witnessed…. what?

How many used its boxy rooms to raise families or drink themselves into lonely slumbotic stupor, put up a Christmas tree or take down a witness statement, derive kingly pleasure from living on top of all the shit going on below or long for a transfer somewhere out of there, far and away from a place, as Luke Wright noted, “…just shy of Kentish lawns…”.

Urbanisation has gradually reduced place to a moot point. Here, in living Jenga, space was king. How you arranged yourself within it, growing outwards against the walls to ensure full value has, over the years, become a busy industry of space-saving notions. As though space itself were the last of a species of great land mammal, hunted to near-extinction by each generation of architectural ideals.

As babies, any amount of space is vast and serves only as an obstacle between us and the thing we really want to get at and put in our mouths.

As children, we begin to respond more favourably to the spaces afforded to us, seeking to use it rather than move through it as rapidly as possible. A Blu-Tac'd poster, a windowsill employed for display purposes, the void beneath our beds used as secret dens to store ourselves… as opposed to the chrysalis of vacuum-packed winter clothes and spare duvets that take our places later in life.

My own parents, given their space, responded with a mixture of penniless necessity and co-ordinated practicality. Thus, the few sticks of furniture they possessed were pushed back against the walls – opening the available footage to as wide an effect as possible.

As a council house child, the idea of a coffee table in the middle of the room, or a staged arrangement of low bookshelves utilised as a room divider would have seemed conversely grandiose and utterly contra to the show of space at one’s disposal.

These blocks, briefly standing only to sustain themselves for the first time in the forty-five years since their creation, bear the marks of their inhabitants like scars. They seem at once entirely brutal and woefully frail. In The Aesthetics of Decay, Dylan Trigg notes: “…through falling from its previous function, and thus outliving the use originally conferred upon it, the ruin transgresses and subverts our everyday encounter with space and place… ruins shatter the myth of rational progress and permanency. What was once built to testify to a singular and eternal present becomes the symbol and proof of its mutability…”.

Were the demolition halted, and the environment allowed to roam free, these buildings would decay with all the heady lustre and rich patina of a classical ruin: the once proud castle, or the archetypal haunted house. Were nature permitted entry, to twine its way through the stairwells, and flap its wings in through the windows, we would perhaps consider them with more kindliness or imbue them with anthropomorphic qualities. They would become living relics instead of dead memories, and remain resonant within the landscape – silent witnesses to a time when we really did think the only way was up.

As it is, they will be gone soon, and that which shall come after them is riding on millions of pounds of regeneration investment and methodological theory in a way that the humble, simple tower block never had to live up to.